Doctor prescribes. You can watch archival films reel Public Affairs on america here on American History tv. Announcer located about one hour drive southwest of pittsburgh in rural western pennsylvania, Meadowcroft Rockshelter has been the site of extensive archaeology work since 1973. After university of pittsburgh students painstakingly removed layer after layer of sediment, evidence of human activity as early as 19,000 years ago was revealed. We visited meadowcroft, the National Historic landmark to learn the story from james adovasio, who has been leaving leading Archaeology Research there for 50 years. James we are currently 46 kilometers southwest of pittsburgh, pennsylvania in Washington County on the north bank of cross creek, which is a small tributary of the ohio river. In 1972, there was a vacancy in the Anthropology Department at the university of pittsburgh. I joined the faculty there. One of the parameters of which job was to set up an Archaeological Training Program that would train not only graduate and undergraduate students in anthropology and archaeology and the protocols of modern excavation, but also to train people in ancillary fields, geologists, climatologists, floral and fauna specialists and so forth. Because i didnt have the opportunity to search for a location for this field operation, due to research commitments in eastern mediterranean, i circulated word amongst my colleagues who directed me to see this particular site, which had actually been discovered in 1955 by the landowner, albert miller. At that particular juncture in time, we thought we understood everything there was to understand about the initial human occupation of the new world. There was a prevalent model about how that event took place, when that event took place, what their lifestyles may have been like, that literally come everybody believed. And the excavations here and at a series of other locations have profoundly altered our perceptions of the past in such a way that literally, everything we thought we knew, we dont know anymore. Cross creek flows into the ohio river directly west of us, about 12. 22 kilometers from here, a little more than six miles from here. With just a little more water in the stream, you could come new down could canoe along the ohio with little difficulty, with a couple of portage points necessary where you would have to move to pedestrian traffic. Any human populations moving up or down cross creek, to and from the ohio river prehistorically, whether it was euroamericans, whether it was native americans, late in the day would have seen this rock shelter and stopped here for varying periods of time. Sometimes just an overnighter, sometimes for a longer time. What attracted us to the site in 1973 when we saw it was the size of the overhang, the fact that even during periods of heavy rain and snow, you are protected from the elements inside. The fact that even when the creeks flood as it has several times during the course of the excavations, the rock shelter is always high and dry. There are permanent springs that provide Drinking Water both west and east of the site, as well as the prepolluted state of cross creek itself would have provided Drinking Water. There is an abundance of edible wild plant and animal food in the area which is a prime attraction, but the protection from the elements is a big deal. It sort of renders this into a kind of prehistoric holiday in, holiday inn, as it were. And all the native americans at the time, whether they belonged to a group that had stayed here before or not, would have been aware that this site existed. And would have, by wordofmouth, transmitted that information either to their own kinsfolk or other groups would have found out about it or rediscovered it. So essentially, if you are going to spend the evening anywhere between here and the ohio river, or pennsylvania, the little town nearby, this is where you would stop and this is what attracted us to this location. And it is the exact same thing that would have attracted prehistoric people here too. Back when the initial excavation started in 1973, we thought we understood everything there was to know about the first people in the new world. In 1933, there were excavations near a town in new mexico called clovis. And from that particular location which is called a Blackwater Draw locality number three, they recovered a particularly distinctive kind of spear point with two channel flakes or flutes taken from either side, probably to facilitate have to. These points had been known previously. In fact, we have known about their existence for several hundred years. They have been found all over most of unglazed seated north unglaciated north america, on down into new mexico, down into south america. The prevailing wisdom was the people that made these points were in fact the first people in the new world. That they had come over from siberia, walked across the berring platform at a time when it was exposed, and then basically sprinted from the unglaciated berring refreeze area down to the tip of south america in less than 500 radiocarbon years, killing off 32 genera of ice age animals on their way. It was thought to have been, by american and canadian archaeologists, the greatest killing event in the history of the planet. Europeans were skeptical from the very beginning. South americans were skeptical because they had material as old as clovis but clearly unrelated to it. And the u. S. And canadian response, as we like to stress, was those guys on the others of the atlantic havent the faintest idea what they are talking about. Those guys in south america dont even speak english. Consequently, we ignored all that data. And in 1973 when we started to work here, none of us believed that the site would be particularly deep in terms of the sediment pile, or particularly old. We were all subscribers as was everybody to the clovis first hypothesis. And according to that, the makers of these points crossed the Bering Straits, about 12 or 14,000 years ago, they were rapidly moving, big game hunters, and they were critical in the extinction process of most of the ice age animals. And between 1933 and the excavations here, more than 500 localities in north and south america were claimed to have been older than clovis. And they would all share a similar trajectory. You would read about them in the local media first or hear about them, then you would find a scientific publication or two about them, and then some fatal flaw would manifest itself. They either had imperfectly layers, theya or had artifacts that were not of human manufacturers or there were there were some other flaw that rendered them they had 15 minutes of fame and they disappeared. Each time one of these sites was found to be not as old as claimed, it reinforced the clovis model. So that by the time we started work here in june of 1973, the clovis model was so firmly entrenched, that there practically except in south america there was no one who didnt believe it. We started the work here because a local historian had been a friend of albert miller, the property owner, who had discovered the site in 1955 and had been looking ever since for somebody to validate his supposition that native americans had camped here. And we were i was part of the group that validated that proposition, that in fact this had been a campsite, for the reasons we indicated. There are other attractions here. The rock shelter is south facing. So the daily trajectory of the sun, the sandstone which forms the roof and walls of the walk shelter, provide a more equitable microenvironment then it is at the bottom of the creek or at the top. So that, in conjunction with those other attributes, a level floor, a high ceiling, so that the prevailing wind which normally blows there is none today blows from west to east across the mouth of the rock shelter, any fires you ignite in the interior are rapidly and efficiently ventilated, any insect pests that might want to bite on you are usually vacated by the prevailing wind. So there is a variety of things that would have drawn you or me or anyone watching this to stay here, and clearly, that was the case prehistorically. While we believed, for those reasons, that people used the site, we had no idea whatsoever how old it would turn out to be. What we wanted to do here was to make sure that in the process of training students, the very latest technologies, the very most highresolution technologies of which i or any of the staff were aware were used here, it was always meant to be a methodological Tour De Force more than a place whose discoveries were paramount. In other words, how you got the data was more critical to us than whatever we found. At least at the beginning. Later on as it turned out, as the site proved to be both older and deeper, we recovered indications that we never imagined would be here that caused an enormous controversy at the time, and only when other sites like this or even older than this were discovered in various parts of the world, was it clear that the clovis first proposition was an error. When columbus originally got here in 1492, before he was the admiral of the ocean sea, so to speak, he encountered aboriginals on semantic a or wherever he landed. And they were the tyee no and he he or membersand of his entourage posed a series of questions about these folk that we have been asking ever since. Who are they . Where did they come from . Via what routes did they employ to get here . And when did they arrive . And a question they didnt ask but which we obviously have addressed here is, what were they doing . What were their lifestyles like . He thought he knew the answers to all of his own questions because he thought he was in the east, not the west indies. So he called them indios, or indians, a term we have used ever since. The supposition was at least within 100 years, but they had arrived here, 2500 years before he did. And that benchmark arrival date has been pushed further and further and further back through the years but it would take a series of intellectual developments in western europe before we could actually answer any of those questions appropriately. The rock shelter has changed dramatically through time, both in terms of its scale or size. The overhang once went clear out to where you see those lights. And now it is located way back in the vicinity of that rock fall event. So in the last 15,000 years, the roof has been steadily retreating to the north. The sediment pile you see here has accumulated in a number of ways. The most common of which, when these big roof all blocks on the west end eastern edge of the site were in place, was by the grain by grain erosion of sand particles from the roof and walls of the rock shelter, which was a slow and very steady process. That a grain by grain erosion would be punctuated at various points in the past by the detachment of roof blocks. First fist sized and then print up and then progressively larger until one of these big blocks came off and on the whole process would repeat itself again, so that never in any two successive years did this site look exactly the same as it did the year before. We would learn that later on in the course of the excavation. We began a trench out here where we are standing outside the drip line which proceeded from south to north. The purpose of which was to explore the deposits, the sediments, the layers, that have been least disturbed by human activity first before going into the interior where the principal dwelling area would have been, the principal activity area, where the disturbance conceivably would have been much more extensive than out here. So we plumbed these deposits first, moved to the north toward the wall of the rock shelter, then subsequently expanded to the east and west. Again, the kinds of things we were able to do here in many instances had never, ever been done before on the planet. Contrary to most archaeological sites, this enterprise from the very beginning, was very heavily funded. We had money from the Meadowcroft Foundation from the university of pittsburgh and a bunch of pittsburgh based corporations. We always had more than ample money. Since you coulds could torture students way more in those days way more than you could now, labor was never an issue because we mandated four years of field school and the duration of the project was such that it usually would begin in may or june and run until september. 12 hours a day, six days a week. And so with a captive audience and all the money in the world, so to speak, we were free to explore issues here, in particular ways that had never been done before. One of those involved, the construction of a series of buildings of which the one we are in now is only the most recent. That prehistorically, or historically, looked like that portion of the one building that is still adhering to that rock fall event. It let us dig basically indoors. Where we could control not only the temperature and the ventilation, but we could control the hue, intensity and chroma of the lighting system so that the excavators could maximize their ability optically, and then by a series of other attributes, to distinguish one layer from another. Probably, at least you or some of your viewing audience, have eaten multilevel desserts. And consisting of lawyers of of layers of cake or icing or nuts or whatever. And the tags you see here are marking foundries between layers. They are basically pneumonic devices so that if you are perverse enough to want to know whether or not you were eating the nut layer in your dessert, you might markets boundary. Mark its boundary. That is where all these tat what all these tags are for. They marked boundaries between stratigraphic levels, of which there are 11 at this type this site. The deepest level, stratus one, is the birmingham shale, which is a much softer rock than the sandstone which makes up the bulk of this particular phenomenon. The most recent level 11, is the stratum that you see there, gradually slanting down toward the creek, minus, of course, the vegetation that it would have grown upon it and minus the remnants of that living tree, the stump of which you can see over there. So that is the original 1973 Ground Surface. The surface you see down here represents a much earlier Ground Surface of the site. It is about 13,500 years old. All of that sediment has accumulated since 13,500 years ago. When we got down to that area where you can see a step, we were essentially at a time frame that would have been equivalent to clovis. We decided to remove the rocks from there, not because we expected to find earlier material because none of us did, but we wanted to get to the birmingham shale to understand the geology of the site. And as soon as those rocks were peeled off and we began to find earlier material, we began to appreciate that the site may be far older than we imagined, and might have represented a very different kind of lifestyle than what the current wisdom was in 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978. We can demonstrate that man was here by at least 4000 b. C. That relates to the whole problem of the people in the new world, because clearly, if he is down here in southwestern pennsylvania by 14,000, he must have come across the Bering Strait land bridge, perhaps as early as 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. And so, during the course of the excavations here, signs of a human presence took many forms. There were obviously artifacts of indisputable human manufacturer made of various kinds of raw materials, usually highgrade shirts or flints as they are popularly called. Or jasper from a wide array of quarries. Some of this raw material came from flint ridge in ohio, some of it came from the owner dog outcrops in new york, some of it came from the pennsylvania jasper quarries in eastern pennsylvania. In any case, we dont think that the populations that were using stone from these farflung areas were in fact visiting all those places and that their territory would have been thousands of square miles. Instead, we think they are exchanging it along with other things back and forth with other groups that live in a widely distributed situation like that. Of course, because the site is relatively wet, the most durable items that are recovered from here are usually made of stone like they are at most archaeological sites. It is worth stressing that when you only get stone or ceramics later in time, you are only getting about 5 or less of what they actually made or used. When a site has very is very, very dry like some of the caves in the west and elsewhere, you get a full representation of what these hunter and gatherers made and used, in the form of plant fiber objects, bone, wood objects, which are far more prominent than stone. Nonetheless, here, we only have a hint of those nondurable technologies. We have some burn basketry, we have some bits and pieces of cordage, we have some bone and wooden artifacts, to give you an idea of what the other side of the technology looked like. Most of the stuff from here in the way of artifacts is in fact stone. And most of it was used either in the procurement transfer or preparation for consumption of wild plant and animal foods. However, unlike the clovis model, it is clear that the earliest people that came to this site where in fact what we call rod spectrum broadspectrum subsistence folk. In other words, the guys would eat anything in their refrigerator. They were eating elk to mouse sized animals. They were eating an incredible assortment of plants. We have 1. 4 million plant remains from here. 956,000 animal bones representing over 105 different species. And they are clearly doing things here all the way through time, all the way up to a. D. 1775, which is within striking distance of the Miller Family taking possession of this property as a virginia landgrant. So there is a juncture here between history and prehistory that is very real. In fact, one of the very first things we encountered when we started excavating here was a large stone line historic fire pit at the very top of which were aluminum fliptop beer cans. As you work your way down in this pit, you encountered a progressively greater depth, beer cans without fliptop scum a steel beer bottles, early beer bottles, and at the bottom, glass that had been flaked by native americans into tools. So the juncture of history and prehistory is very vivid here. And all of the stages of prehistory that are represented in Eastern North America are known from here. Beginning with of paleo indian witches whenever people first got to the new world up to about 10,500 years ago. And during which time, the environment was rather different than it is presently. Not dramatically so, but different enough that you would notice. And ice age animals were still around. And then about 10,500 years ago, most of them go extinct. Not due to human predation in many instances, but because of the stresses of environmental change. And you start a very long archaic. There is a peculiarity to the english language and all the indoeuropean languages. We like to divide things into threes. There is an early, middle, and a late archaic. And if you are particularly a, there is an earlier, later early, and so far and so on and so forth. During the archaic, you have native americans gradually increasing in numbers in this area. Late in the archaic, they will be settling for several months at a time at the various open sites in the area. Throughout the sequence of the archaic and paleo indian, the populations that are using this site are principally nomadic. We dont know where they are when they are not here. Tracking human beings across the landscape is a very difficult proposition. Were it not for the literature, for instance, the archaeological evidence for the invasion of the mongols and huns in europe is practically nonexistent. So that we are not really sure where these people are when they are not here. We have studied the drainage more fully to try and ascertain how many other kinds on representations of archaeological sites there might be here. In the 12,000 hectares that make up this entire cross creek watershed, there are more than 330 other archaeological sites. That represent the meanderings of these populations all the way through time. It is not until about 3500 calendar years ago that you begin to see these large seasonal camps, and even later, the equivalent of the kinds of villages that would have existed when the europeans arrived. When you have ceramics, when you have domesticated plants, all introduced with the exception of say, sunflowers which are locally cultivated, corn, beans, and squash and pottery arrive in the woodland period. The woodland, as in early, middle, and late, and we put an end to the populations by driving the native americans out of fear or killing them off. Out of here and killing them off. In point of fact, all of those stages are represented here, both by artifacts and by pits of varying configuration or activity areas. We have a series of early overnight fireplace remanence remnants from the very first folk that were here, and then later on in time, you get more elaborate pits that may have been reused that are lined with clay and so forth. What all the way through that long sequence of a human presence, which is now known to be in excess of 16,000 radiocarbon years, or 19,000 calendar years, the people are using this site the same way. To collect wild plant and animal food, even after the appearance of settled villages, it is still a place to supplement their domestic diet with wild plant and animal food. Im dave schofield, the director. On the east face of the excavation, there is this interesting profile right here that has evidence of campfires. All of these reddest stains here, if you were up close, you would also see bits of charcoal and layers of ash. But that indicates where campfires were built. In that roughly six foot profile, there are literally thousands of years of campfires represented, built one upon another, in that fire pit. That was what i like to refer to as the sweet spot of the rock shelter prior to the collapse of the new roof all. When that rock collapsed between a. D. 300 and 600, it changed the dynamics in the site and so subsequent activity took place further to the west. But for thousands of years, that was the center of activity here at the site. Theres another fire pit location here. In the center of this fire pit right there is a freshwater mollusk. Of this fire pit right there is a freshwater mollusk. That is a species that would have been found in the ohio river, requiring a deeper and faster moving water, and that is where that was uncovered in the center of that fire pit. Roughly 4000 years ago, that mollusk was presumably eaten here at the site. But then the shell was discarded and left in the fire pit. And that is where it remains today. There is also further to the east, right here is a rib from a white tailed deer, and right around the corner is the end of a long bone from the same deer poking out. That would have been butchered here roughly 400 years ago. Two of the 956,000 remains recovered from this site. All of these tags you see in the profiles indicate the quality of indicate the strata of the site. This is the top surface layer. Each of those numbers indicate a particular layer as it is encountered. There is also a few tags. For example, this one right here reads a. D. 1775. That inscribed line at that level indicates where the Ground Surface was in the Third Quarter of the 18th century. Between that and the top surface is 200 years, essentially. All of the area that has been excavated that you see has been excavated over the course of many years and a number of field schools. But with nothing larger than an trowel. Ogists this was done very slowly and in a painstaking manner. It really illustrates the care and precision of this archaeological site. The area remaining represents one third of the site. There is still more to excavate. But that was left intentionally. Archaeology is a destructive science. So in the process of studying the sites, you actually destroy it. That is why documentation is so important. But also, some of the site has been left for future excavation. There are portions of the rock shelter where different re conducted. We have places in the site where occasionally, they would burn off the trash that had accumulated here from previous visits. Those are called fire floor areas. They could have done it on purpose. The point is, many of these layers representing a activity is thinner than a trowel blade or thinner than the fork kinds which fork thines with you ate this morning. And the excavators would remove those lawyers with single edged razor blades. The whole purpose of what were doing again was to be as methodologically precise as we could. So that we could study in detail 16,000 years of environmental change, and the human adjustments to those changes. That the site turned out to be old was a bonus. It was icing on a cake we never intended to bake. Part of the emphasis and a good part of the emphasis here is the material culture. We are fortunate in having a relatively large number of students who have been specifically trained in various courses for the analysis of different kinds of artifactual material. No matter what the size or complexity of the artifact class that is involved, we think we can get the most, so to speak, that the class material has to of grew. And we have learned a great deal about the makers and manufacturers of those materials. This is 70614. When the excavation closes down for the winter, student anthropologists begin indepth analyses of the thousands of items collected during the summer. As much as six hours of Laboratory Study is required for each hour spent in the fields. Fortunately, because of the favorable conditions, we have basketry, among of which is the older material in the mississippi river. We can say quite a bit about how the populations manufacture their basketry and what they used these containers for. The artifacts themselves are the medium by which the populations that use it interacted with their environment. As long as most organisms are alive, they accumulate an isotope of carbon from the atmosphere in the transpiration process, radiocarbon 14, which breaks down at the rate of one every 5700 mass years. When you or a plant croak, by measuring the amount of radiocarbon left in your carcass, we can tell when that event might have happened give or take a few years. And so when the first dates began to come back from those early fire pits and we began to realize the site was probably a lot older than we imagined it to be, there was great skepticism among us and the crew because that is not supposed to be that way. And gradually, we became convinced ourselves that it was older than we thought. We began to publish extensively on this location. It became a very controversial place because there were not any other ones for the longest time. And as with any field, when you challenge the received wisdom, you will deal with grief. Whether it is about how to tune a racecar, how to produce a documentary, how to excavate an archaeological site, if it is contrary to what you thought you knew, it must be wrong. Often times, a person, whatever his field or her field, doesnt want to change their mind, even though science says that is what we are supposed to do, because in so doing, we somehow think we are negating ourselves or repudiating our mentors and we dont want to go there. We dont want to say that the guy or lady that taught you x is dumber than a brick. Because the information you derived from these kinds of locations in fact undermines often times previously existing models. And so, as a result, had we been filming this in 1973, the vast majority of the field would have reacted very negatively to the information that seemed to be coming from the site. And they would have a variety of reasons why it must be wrong. Now that we have a bunch of places that indicate the old model is wrong, it is a different story. But early on at least, we were as skeptical as our audience was and our professional audience and our lay audience. And we certainly were not contemplating the people who lived here were here long before clovis points were made, or that their lifestyles were different, or that they may have arrived here very differently than was hypothesized. Other sites began to appear like in southern chile, and then nowadays, there are sites in both north and south america that demonstrate clearly that the manufacture of clovis points occurred long after the first arrival of humans in the new world. So what we have discovered here in all of these deposits is camping debris from thousands of separate visits in different areas horizontally of the site. They are not coming here every year, they are not staying here very long. We know from the flowering period of the plants that are available, that they are coming from late august to at most early november. And it is a time when the local animal populations would have been the densest, the mass meditation would have been supporting white tailed deer, elk and other forms. The little animals would have been most common. They may also have been coming here briefly in the spring. We get to bird eggs from the site, but they could have been living here at the same time as humans and humans might not have been responsible for those bird eggs. But in any case, we know the major use of the site is in the fall. And it is by groups that are purely migratory, either in the course of a seasonal round where they go from place to place to place and this is but one of their stops, or from settled villages that they would foray out from to visit this place in order to collect wild plant and animal foods. If you and i were familiar enough with the vegetation that currently exists in the drainage of the animal life, we could live here comfortably, if there were five or six or seven or eight of us, for at most, a couple of weeks. Then we would exhaust those resources and have to move on. And it looks like through time, there are different moments in time here when the site is more heavily used than at other times. And that is probably a reflection of climate and microclimate changes at this location. Sometimes it is colder than it is today, is drier than it is today. Sometimes it is warmer than it is today or it is wetter than it is today. And those subtle changes have subtle adjustments that the people have to make when they are visiting the site. The excavations here were done in such a way that we could in fact maximize the retrieval of data over however long the site was lived in to address questions about the past that may either have been addressed imperfectly at other locations, or never been asked at all. One of the things that people tend to forget is that the aboriginals that use this location are essentially just like us. Sapiens sapiens. They have the same mental powers, linguistic powers that we do. They are us. They are dealing with problems different inrhaps degree than we do, but how they resolve those issues, whether it is sea level change in florida or lord knows what else, is instructive for us to appreciate and because they are us, it is easier to identify with their lives and their trajectories here and in other places like this than perhaps if you just read about it in a book. When you have a gifted staff, which we were fortunate enough in having that addressed not only what the actors and actresses of antiquity were doing here, but the stage, the geological stage of which they performed, and knew what they wanted to learn and we could in fact buy or get whatever we needed to do that, you can pose questions. You can ask things as you might imagine that you just cant do in other places. We had a telephone on the site that was connected by a modem to the mainframe computer at the university of pittsburgh. We could computerize data instantaneously. [whirring] the codirector of the motocross project has designed a computer methodology that integrates information from every area of meadowcroft research. Computer analysis makes it possible to draw an accurate picture of how the people who visited the rock shelter interacted with their environment. I think the raw data, generally using a technique called factor analysis, which is data reduction it looks for , things that behave together. Say people during one time were eating a lot of fish, and as they happen to be down by the stream, they also picked up a lot of crabs and carried them up to the site and deposited crab claws and fish scales on the site. And then during other times, when they perhaps did not favor marine things, they would have gone to hunting deer or Something Like that. So there is going to be a simultaneous drop off in fish scales and crab claws. That is what is known as a correlation. Things will come out of the foam material about their hunting patterns. Out of the bone material about their hunting patterns. Things will come out of the stone tool material that tell about how their stone tool making habits change. All of these things will add to an evergrowing array of information about how people behave when they came to visit Meadowcroft Rockshelter through 16,000 years worth of time. What we have tried to do through the years is incorporate, since 1973, any new technologies that might possibly yield data about the site which we had not currently collected. And so in the recent past, within the last several weeks, we collected soil samples for environmental dna retrieval from several locations on the site that are focusing on what kinds of plants and animals may have been here on either side of the socalled ice age modern time period boundary and is there any human dna preserved in these sediments . And of course, when we initially excavated here, dna research was in its infancy, and so it was not used. And just as you try to deploy the latest generations of cameras and sound equipment that you can, we have tried to incorporate the latest techniques oftentimes from other fields to ask questions that had never been asked before about the past. From 1973 in the initial stages of the excavation on, we have invited both professionals and the lay public to come and visit the site. Since the Meadowcroft Foundation conjoined with the John Heinz History Center, they have more formalized the public viewing process so that tours are offered here during the seasons that the area is open for visitation. And four times a year, i give tours of the site, insider tours, where i explain some of the things i have explained to you about what might have transpired here. Archaeologists have a responsibility, especially if you are spending public money, to translate the story of the past to an audience. If we dont do that, and many of my colleagues dont like to do that, then we are failing on some level. If i spend your tax money to excavate here, the least we can do is tell you what we found in a way that is easily comprehensible and at the same time addresses the scope and sweep of the past in ways that you can understand. And unfortunately, in so many excavations weathered as a roman site around the mediterranean or whether it is an early site here in the new world or a later site in the new world, the archaeologists dont do that and the John Heinz History Center exists to tell a variety of stories. They have exhibits on the vietnam war and the landings on the moon and so on and so forth. This is but one of many stories that they try and tell the public and that we, as participants in the collection of the stories, attempt to translate for the public. And so that is what we do here. Winston churchill, the late Prime Minister of england during world war ii and a more than casual historian, observed on one occasion in one of his books that a society that doesnt value its history or by extension, its prehistory, doesnt have one. A society that has no past has no presence or present and sure as hell doesnt have a future. By understanding where we as a species have been in the past, we are in fact understanding how we got to be this way and where we might be going. That is why we do this, beside the fact that it is fun to take bits and pieces of information, put them together like a forensic scientist does when reconstructing a crime scene orept our scenes are 10,000 are generations old, millions of years old in some cases. We are doing the same thing, we are taking palpable evidence about the past to try to figure out where we have been so that we know better where we are going. Announcer you can learn more about Meadowcroft Rockshelter by visiting heinz history center. Org, and you can watch this and all other American History tv programs at cspan. Org history. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago, what our mission continues. To provide an unfiltered view of government. Already this year, we have brought you primary election